Educational Loan Forgiveness

 

I suppose it was to be expected that President Biden’s initiative on some debt forgiveness of educational loans would stimulate superficial and partisan reactions, but I am nonetheless disappointed by the response.  Depending on which superficial view one favors, the proposed loan cancellations are either a boondoggle give-away half-way to being a bribe for potential Democratic voters or a significant progressive step toward social and racial justice and the razing of at least one small mole hill on the famously uneven playing-field.  The nation is already at political war, and if truth is the proverbial first casualty of war, subtlety and nuance follow very closely in its wake.

 

The student debt crisis is a national emergency.  Admittedly it is not the only national emergency, or even the most threatening.  But it does in my opinion need to be addressed.  The fashion in which the Biden administration is addressing it not surprisingly has some good aspects and some bad aspects.  The muddle is not uncharacteristic of most of the generally meager results achieved in a government so narrowly divided and so ferociously animated by partisan spirit.  In my opinion the package is not one deserving more of either praise or blame than at about the sixty percent level, but of course we live in a world of hundred-percenters.  Hundred percentism is seldom nuanced.  The issues involved here are many and complex.  And since President Biden’s action is easy to praise and easy to attack if one seeks to make selective partisan and  polemical points, I suppose the discussion is likely to remain at that level.  The cost is the loss of an opportunity for a thoughtful discussion in which any just observer is likely to be of at least two minds.  In this brief blog essay, I can touch upon only one or two of many thoughts that come to mind.

 

One of the first points to make, because it is so often denied or doubted, is that the costs of higher education are real costs.  Not that skepticism is entirely unwarranted.  Like other real costs, some of them can also be inflated.  But almost everything about higher education, and certainly everything about residential institutions with serious scientific ambitions, has become increasingly expensive.  The principal ongoing task of administrative officers in all but a fairly small segment of American colleges is constricting often good educational ideas to the constraints of limited and unpredictable budgets.  Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most obviously inflated costs of higher education is bloated administration itself.  In many places there are whole offices devoted to helping students negotiate and navigate government loans!    Because if you build it, they will come.  The vigorous encouragement to borrow educational funds, especially under the Obama presidency, not surprisingly found takers, both among prospective students and start up educational ventures.  Even in the shadow of the crisis, the “demand” side—high school graduates assuming they will go to college almost as a matter of course—remains very strong.

 

Public subsidization of expansive higher education, one awkward means of which is student debt cancellation,  is one solution, but hardly the most efficient.  Somehow, it seems to me, the college problem has been separated in the public mind from the high school problem.  There are numerous facets of the high school problem, one of them being the dramatic discrepancies among high schools in terms of what they teach and how effectively they teach it.  This is one of several serious social issues apparently unapproachable with a liberating honesty and freshness.  Is there anyone in America who does not know what a “good school” is?  There certainly cannot be a real estate agent in the country who doesn’t.  The lives of millions of parents are organized around a belief in and search for a “good school”.  And if you know what a good school is, you perforce know what a not so good one is.  I will not say a bad school, though the laws of thought do make one think there must be such things.  One rough-and-ready parental definition of a good school is a school that gets your kid into college.

 

I graduated from high school in 1954.  I was a good student, supported by good teachers and encouraged by my parents, and I did take applying for college more or less for granted.  But this was far from a universal expectation among my classmates, of whom I would guess about half planned to go immediately into the work force.  Already the percentage of college applicants was a large increment from prewar years.  My parents did not go to college, and very few people in their extensive social circles had gone to college.  But my parents, though not highly educated, were well educated in useful fundamentals.  They were high-school graduates, a term they rightly claimed with pride.  That is because an American high school diploma in 1920 was considered a reliable warrant that its possessor was adequately prepared for civic engagement and a sound candidate for meaningful employment in the industrial, commercial, or artisanal worlds.  That is, they had skills of literacy and numeracy at a significant level, some fundamental scientific knowledge and a familiarity with “civics” that were a foundation for intelligent social and political engagement.

 

We no longer live in the world of 1920.  In today’s plugged-in, frothy post-manufacturing America our high schools produce only a limited number of graduates capable of doing jobs for which employers are willing to pay decently and which offer actual “career” opportunities.  This is a problem certainly destined to get worse, and certainly destined to widen yet further the very troublesome “wealth gap,” which is not unrelated to a “skills gap.”  Right now the first two years of “college”—and especially many of the colleges most subsidized by borrowed money—often deal with materials that rightly belong in well-funded public high schools.  Surely today’s students should have the opportunities, and the challenges, W. T. Sherman had in his backwoods Ohio school in the 1830s?  Is there a reason that American high-school graduate should not be able to read and write the English language competently, or have a grasp of mathematics to the threshold of pre-calculus, or have had a course in a laboratory science (including computer science), or make real progress in acquiring a foreign language, and enjoy some exposure to the serious study of history, social science, and the arts?  That is not too much to ask for four years of study, and no student would have to spend a dime to achieve it.  But it would require a lot of what my grandmother used to call “elbow grease”—both on the part of our students and that of our educational authorities.

 

 

 

NEXT WEEK

 

We are very much hoping that next week we shall be relaxing with old and dear friends in a Provençal farmhouse.  Travel arrangements are a little complicated, and I am not entirely sure that I shall have access to the means of mounting a post on Wednesday, September 7; but even if not, if all goes well, regular postings should resume no later than the following week.

 

Passenger Locator Form

 Nice Airport; 'twould be nice to get there

Only as the summer approaches its end do I fully realize how much fun you can have simply sitting at home and letting the world come to you.  That pretty much describes the summer.  Well, “world” is a bit over the top.  I really mean a microcosm of family and friends.  It began with a loud bang early in June (granddaughter Sophia’s wedding) and continued with generously timed visits from all our children and, at one time or another all our other grandchildren.  Last week we had the stimulation of a wonderful houseguest—once a student here, now a very senior professor at Stanford and expert on ancient Greek drama—whose wide-ranging conversation was an intellectual battery charge.  We were not absolute stay-at-homes (stays-at-home?), as we did venture forth in a minimal way for a couple of great museum visits thanks to our local great friend Frank.  But there’s lots to do around home.   Right now, I find myself immersed in a challenging research project in a field far from my alleged specialty.  As it keeps expanding, and as I work so slowly these days, I may never get so far as defining my actual topic.  Remember: it’s the journey, not the destination.

 

We are now in the countdown to the summer’s capstone event—a repeat trip to the Provençal house party of our great English friend Andrew, whom we have known since our Oxford days in the late 1950s!  I have written about earlier trips to Salernes before, and I hope I shall be able to write about the delights of this year’s French trip soon.  Just at the moment what is on my mind is bureaucracy, which is at least French by way spirit and etymology.  I am aware of the risk.  Talking about bureaucracy may be as boring as experiencing it.  Bureaucracy has been a French specialty at least since the time of Henri IV.

 

It is not simply that we have become elderly fussbudgets, though I acknowledge that is part of it.  (Whether I “own” or even “embrace” fussbudgetry, as the online gerontologists insist I must, is another matter.)  Travel really is pretty difficult for most people these days.  We are scheduled to fly to the south of France on a semi-luxurious French “boutique” airline, La Compagnie, on whose direct flight from Newark to Nice we have semi-luxuriated a couple of times in the past.  We are also enjoying the professional services of a travel expert who has been a personal friend of many years.  And as always we enjoy the help and support of our solicitous adult children.  I am hoping that with all these resources we shall be able to overcome the crisis of the PLF, which is to say, the Passenger Locator Form.  We have been seriously instructed by our airline that our permission to fly to France depends upon our filling out a digital PLF correctly no later than forty-eight hours before our scheduled departure.

 

            It is quite understandable, and also laudable, that in the midst of a pandemic the French government, or indeed any other, would like to keep track of visitors to French soil and to ascertain, in addition to their actual “Covid status,” the places these people are coming from, the specific seats they occupied on the plane, the address within those places where they are planning to hang out,  and when they plan to do the hanging.  The aptness of the phrase passenger locator precisely identifies the purpose of the form.

 

I have had enough experience living in France, that when its Bureaucracy says “Frog”, or even “Grenouille,” I jump.  Resistance is generally futile, leading only to further delay and unpleasant conversations.  So I went to the link to the Passenger Locator Form provided by La Compagnie.  It was actually very simple.  The first thing one had to do is choose one of the three destinations in which the bureaucrats are interested: France, Malta, and Slovenia.  That was a piece of cake.  I’m going to France.  Click.  The rest of the form was nearly as simple.  I finished it in five minutes.  Five minutes after that I had received my digital confirmation and printed out a copy.

 

About a week or ten days after that we got around to Joan’s form.  Expert that I now was, I was eager to show her how easy it was it to get located.  Go to the airline’s website, follow its link to the PLF form, and Bob’s your uncle.  The form was indeed there, but it had been dramatically altered since my last visit.  Your obligatory first step was still to identify your country of destination, but now there were only two possibilities, neither of which was France.  I was now faced with two singularly unappealing options.  I could try to find a last-minute AirB&B accommodation in Malta or Slovenia and simply suck it up.  After all, nobody’s life is an endless succession of first choices.  But we really wanted to go to Nice, and truth is, I wasn’t even entirely sure where Slovenia is.  The other option was to try to sort out the conundrum by personal telephonic communication with a human being at the “Customer Service number” of La Compagnie.  In the Internet Age no three words hold more terror than Customer Service number.

 

I hardly need tell you of an ordeal with which you yourself are doubtless intimately familiar.  It begins with sounds of a telephone ringing for five minutes or more followed by the solemn but recorded assurance that your call is very important—though, one must conclude, just not quite important enough actually to answer.    Please stay on the line…the next available agent…etc.  You then advance to the Musak stage, which is essentially a progression from passive to active aggression.  But at La Compagnie—boutique and semi-luxurious, remember—a very suave person does eventually pick up the phone.  Over several attempts we have had both suave men and suave women.  To none of these persons, however, has it proved possible to convey the subtleties of a situation not in fact resolvable by clicking the “little blue link” on their “easy-to-use form”.

 

The situation remains unresolved as I write this, but we remain hopeful.  I noted that the Covid travel requirements fall under the portfolio of the French Ministry of the Interior.  Searching the Ministry’s website, I found a document entitled “Covid 19: International Travel.”  In it I read: “In light of the latest developments in the pandemic, the port health control system has been discontinued, pursuant to the law terminating the emergency measures instituted to combat the COVID-19 outbreak…Accordingly, the rules previously applied to travellers to France no longer apply effective from August 1, 2022.  Travellers are now exempt from any formalities prior to entry into France, be it in mainland France or overseas, and no longer required to present a health pass, regardless of the country or place of departure.”  If that’s not a smoking gun, it’s at least a steaming pea-shooter.

 

What seems to have happened is this.  Between the time I filled out the on-line form about two weeks ago and the time Joan tried to do the same about a week later, the IT folks at the French Ministry of the Interior discovered either (1) their own recently published policy that “The rules previously applied to travelers to France no longer apply effective from 1 August 2022” or (2) that they had forgotten to make changes to their website reflecting the policy changes of which they were in theory aware.  Bureaucratic change, which can be implemented at warp speed high up, at times may take a long time to soak into the consciousness of those appointed to implement it.  So they simply struck France from the list, but perhaps failed to send a memo to the airlines?  If any of my world-traveling readers knows anything about this, I’d love to hear from you, and soon.

Our Continuing Education

Poster advertising appearances of LaFolette and Debbs

Among the horrors of the past week’s news, the one that really appalls me is the atrocious assault on the writer Sir Salman Rushdie as he was about to begin a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, not far from Erie, PA.  The medical reports concerning Rushdie’s condition as they have appeared in the press are encouraging.  He has been gravely but not fatally wounded.  It is impossible to imagine that ten forceful knife wounds to neck, throat, or abdomen could be anything other than “life threatening”.

 

There are many reasons to be shocked by this horrifying attack.  The tangent I am choosing is a minor and eccentric one.  (Speaking of eccentricity, the authorities addressing the crime profess to be puzzled as to the attacker’s motives.  According to the Times, “The New York State Police said at a news conference on Friday afternoon that there was no indication of a motive, but that they were working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”   Two major investigative bodies between them might eventually discover a possible clue: Rushdie has been under a highly public sentence of death in a fatwa pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran since 1989.)   

 

 In my role as a literature professor, I am not among the most ardent admirers of Rushdie’s novels.   That is a statement about personal literary taste.  But who could fail to admire the man’s brilliance, his courage, and his embodiment of humane and humanistic virtues?  Not the least of these is the willingness of a highly cerebral novelist to speak to general audiences of what are usually called “mature students”.  That is exactly one of the things I myself have enjoyed most in my retirement years.  So-called “adult education,” though hardly an American monopoly, has been an American specialty with origins in an earlier and more robustly democratic phase of our history.

 

Some years ago, in doing the research for a study of influential anti-Communist  writers of the mid-twentieth century, I discovered Richard Krebs.  To the degree that he is still known at all today, it is under his pen name of Jan Valtin, author of an extraordinary book entitled Out of the Night, which was the best-seller of the year in this country in 1941, just as America was about to enter the War.  Krebs was born in 1905, and he had an adventurous and somewhat mysterious life.  By the time he was thirty-five he had travelled the world as a  sailor in the German merchant marine and been a Communist agent, a prisoner in San Quentin, a probable Gestapo informer, an illegal immigrant to the United States (twice), and an aspiring writer who supported himself by being a janitor in a yeshiva and a house painter among other things.  It is not easy to stay under the radar when you are the best-selling author in the country, and his chameleon politics guaranteed him controversy, passionate enemies, and passionate friends.  In what seemed at first a Mission Impossible he and some influential friends set out on a successful campaign to keep him from being deported as an illegal alien—a category soon enough upgraded by history to “enemy alien”.

 

A major event in this campaign was Valtin’s publication of a hugely efficacious essay in the May, 1941, issue of Readers’ Digest.  It was called “American Dawn,” and surely must be one of the more successful pieces in the history of political propaganda.  It is the saccharine account of the conversion of a Communist thug and hit man to the enlightenment of American democracy.  Sure, he broke a few bureaucratic immigration rules and did a little time for an atrocious assault here or there, but he now recognizes the shining superiority of the American way of life!  One point he made in this essay stuck in my mind.  In Europe, he claimed, a university education was the exclusive privilege of the upper classes, whereas he as an incarcerated felon had been able to take extension courses at the University of California!  (He also said the San Quentin cuisine was superior to that in the messes of German merchant ships.)

 

Furthermore, the educational claim was actually true in spirit as well as fact.  America has been a leader in many different forms of “adult education,” one of the earlier manifestations of which was the Chautauqua, a kind of secular, educational tent meeting that took the name of  the upstate New York town of its first appearance.  These meetings could mix the atmospheres of classroom and county fair.  The lecture Salman Rushdie was about to deliver was at the site of the first Chautauqua in a modern auditorium of the Chautauqua Institution built to commemorate the founding of a popular form of continuing education that, according to Teddy Roosevelt, was the most American thing in America.  As a politician, he saw the Chautauqua primarily as an arena of American democratic culture in which new and differing views could be advanced in civility and civil competition.  The ironies of history are more morbid than those dreamed up by novelists.  The “dialogue” lecture Rushdie was about to deliver was on the subject of America as a refuge for persecuted writers!

 

 “Continuing education” of course is as broad as education itself.  In the old days, meaning before the triumph of electronic media in the later twentieth century, there were numerous “lecture agencies” whose agents brokered interesting talks by interesting people for a wide variety of eager audiences.  At the height of the controversy about his book in 1941-2, Jan Valtin made a pretty good living for a while giving lectures (or rather variations on a lecture) for which he was paid $100, a princely sum in those days.  There are still celebrity public speakers for hire, but in today’s cultural landscape they constitute a small part of adult education.  In contrast, there must be many hundreds, and for all I know thousands, of active “adult schools,” “senior colleges,” learning tours and cruises organized by educational institutions (“alumni colleges”), general interest lecture series sponsored by civic and religious groups, Ted talks, Renaissance Weekends, and so forth.  In my own town of Princeton there are at least half a dozen such enterprises.  I have myself taught in four of them.  In the significantly named Evergreen Forum, in three sequential years I was able to offer a course on Dante’s Comedy, teaching the three sections (Hell, Purgatory, Heaven) in their artistically incremental order.  What an opportunity and privilege—and a gift of retirement!

                                             

Chautauqua tent 

Not all the problems we face in the world or indeed in our personal lives are the products of ignorance or misunderstanding, but a sufficient number of them are, for me to persevere in my belief that formal education and personal intellectual growth—two sides of the same coin—are primary requirements of a healthy society and a happy life.  They are certainly a great solace of advancing age.  That an eminent author should expose himself to a murderous attack by a fanatic for his willingness to advance the old goals of the Chautauqua is sad beyond belief.

 

Cruise course

 

Bishop Colenso

John William Colenso (1814-1883)

Research projects are sometimes like the long Greyhound bus trips of my adolescence in which the travel part was usually more stimulating than the arrival part.  For long hours, looking out of the window, you often saw interesting, even intriguing new things.  Recently I have been reading widely in some nineteenth-century literary topics as they relate to trends in religious thought and in revolutionary politics.  I think I know at least the general direction in which I am going; but I am reluctant to hurry along the Interstate when there are so many inviting little side roads.  Just at the moment I am much engaged with a new friend, John William Colenso (1814-1883), the Anglican bishop of Natal in southern Africa.

 

How to describe Colenso?  You have perhaps read Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s last and most depressing novel (1895).  Jude Fawley was a Wessex proletarian who dreamed of being a classics scholar at Oxford and undertook heroic self-improvement toward that nearly impossible end, only to be caught in the biological trap of feminine wiles and parental responsibility and forced to earn his meagre wage as a village stonemason.  Well, Colenso was an impoverished Cornish lad destined not for obscurity but for celebrity: an anti-Jude, so to speak.  Animated by an unwavering evangelical piety and a nearly incredible work ethic, aided by some good luck and timely help, he won a place at St. John’s College, Cambridge.  A brilliant mathematician, he won university prizes and a college fellowship.  His genius was comprehensive.  Mainly self-taught skills in the classical tongues and history made him a suitable candidate for ordination in the established Church.  As deacon and priest he taught for a while.  He briefly served in a Norwich parish.

 

We are now around mid-century.  The consolidation of British imperial expansion in southern Africa is advancing.  The Protestant missionary societies on both sides of the Atlantic are vigorous.  The Anglican bishop of South Africa established a new diocese along the coast to the northeast: Natal, with a mainly Zulu native population.  Victorian ecclesiastical politics may puzzle us.  Who is the perfect man to convert an African nation ever growing in its power over neighboring tribes, a nation whose spear-bearing warriors may well be a match for the Queen’s fusiliers?  The answer is obvious: a nerdy workaholic Cornishman of minimal pastoral experience whose meagre public fame rests on his widely used math textbooks.  Not without apprehension, but sustained by an unshakable faith, John Colenso and his equally formidable wife, Sarah Frances Bunyon, took up their assignment.

 

Colenso’s relationship with his Zulu flock was a mutual love affair almost from the start.  The bishop loved their nobility, their intelligence, their sense of family loyalty and responsibility.  The story has tragic elements; much of Colenso’ constructive work was overwhelmed by the Zulu War of 1879—an almost fated event for which the insolence of British imperial policy was as decisive as the imperial imprudence of the Zulu king Cetshwayo.

 

                                           Zulu army at Isandlwana
 

Colenso studied the Zulu language with energy and effectiveness.  He mastered its phonology, including the clicks so foreign to the European ear, in a matter of weeks.  He composed, and had printed on presses he brought with him, an extensive Zulu-English dictionary, a grammar, and Zulu versions of the Prayer Book, the New Testament, and selected parts of the Hebrew Scriptures.  He had not thought of himself as theologian or biblical critic, but circumstances forced those roles upon him.  Colenso soon acquired an indispensable Zulu convert and colleague, William Ngidi, famous in the instinctively racist British press of the day as “the intelligent Zulu” or “a sort of coloured Spinoza”.  Intelligent he was.  Upon being told of the talking serpent, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s ark, and the parting of the Red Sea, Mr. Ngidi politely asked Colenso whether he in fact believed those things.  Colenso, an honest man, was taken aback.  He thought for a while and realized he didn’t.  Even less did he believe that the truth of Salvation History depended on the literal veracity of myths.  In earlier centuries he would have been burned at the stake.  Now he could only be cancelled by High Churchmen, defunded by the missionary societies, and abandoned by fair-weather friends like F. D. Maurice.  His legal rights were in the domain of the State, and State trumped Church.  All terribly awkward, but…To defend himself, Colenso, from his jungle library, penned a series of theological blockbusters.

 

Certain Christians in all ages have paradoxically believed that the universal salvation of mankind necessarily required that billions of human souls burn eternally in hell.  Happily relegated to hell-fire were those, like Origen, whose optimism was judged excessive.  Like Augustine, Luther and many others before him, Colenso found enlightenment in a deep reading of the Epistle to the Romans.  He concluded that salvation was plenary.  It did not depend on propitiations, rites, ceremonies, corporal penances, or a good deal of other churchy stuff.  God had manifested a universal love in Christ in which all human beings basked.

 

That was a biblical interpretation that could be questioned.  There were, however, also biblical facts that could be demonstrated.  Colenso turned next to the Pentateuch, in honor of which he had named his horse Penta. It had universally been believed forever among Jews and Christians that the first five books of the Bible (Torah, Pentateuch) had been written by Moses.  Earlier nineteenth-century scholarship had, to put it mildly, begun to undermine this belief.  Colenso scarcely acknowledged it.  No surviving writing could be attributed to Moses.  The books of the Pentateuch were by several authors of quite different periods.  In particular, Deuteronomy could not possibly be as early as had been assumed.  Colenso the mathematician showed the absurdity of the census reports of the Exodus.    Colenso the anthropologist would not credit that human beings sprang from a single racial ancestor, Adam.  Colenso the friend of the great geologist Lyell knew that our universe had not been created in six days.  Colenso the zoologist looked beyond the cubits to the real-life problems Noah would have faced in his ark.  None of this was done in a debunking spirit, but rather in the spirit of redefining the genres of the old Hebrew writings for what they really were.  All this brought down upon Colenso the condemnation of the orthodox, and even a heresy trial.  But scientific and textual truth, as he saw it, did not diminish by one whit the fervor of his Christian faith as ratified by his life experience and the Epistle to the Romans.  And all this writing—seven volumes on the Pentateuch alone--was done in stolen hours around the edges of the heavy daily practical demands of his office.  The man was a phenomenon.  “There is no infallible  book for our guidance,” he wrote, “as there is no infallible Church or infallible man….But [God] gives us light enough upon our path that we may do our work here faithfully and fear no evil.”

Contemporary caricature
 

Dear, dear

 

 

My last essay had to do with attempts to coerce language to conform to social and political ideas of our fancy.  This one begins with a meditation on language that has become so formulaic that we seldom think about it at all.  In the household doldrums of Covid-world we have tried, probably unconsciously,  to make something out of very little by anticipating the daily arrival of the mail.  Since the invention of email real letters are virtually unheard of,* but if you are desperate, you may actually cast an eye over the abundant junk mail, and if really desperate you may even be likely to open it.  For the past couple of years I have received, maybe once or twice a month, a letter from a land company offering to buy from me some acres I own in the Ozarks.  I deduce there are land agents all over the country sifting through tax records in county court houses.  But not a chance!  My grandchildren will decide how this little bit of gorgeous wilderness will be shared with the world in its natural state and quite without the help of a “developer” whose return address is a post office box in Sparks, Nevada.

 

I opened a letter that began…Dear John…I felt annoyed and aggrieved, irrationally, and for more than one reason.  The man signing the letter, Wilbur Somebody, didn’t know me from Aristotle, but presumes to address me by my first name in the hopes of bulldozing cedar trees and putting up a ticky-tacky split level.  Furthermore, that name itself, John, is regularly used to denote such things as a prostitute’s client or a toilet.  Furthermore yet, a “dear John” is a specialized form of an unwanted missive that revived unhappy adolescent memories.  These associations are not Wilbur’s fault, exactly, but Wilbur was what I had at hand to be annoyed by.  It was the word dear that I focused upon.  Everybody who writes to anybody calls that person dear.  But surely they don’t really mean it.  They cannot possibly even think about it.  Dear means esteemed, held in affection, beloved.  As an epistolary salutation, dear is a meaningless convention.  Yet I use it all the time and shall presumably continue to do so for the remainder of my days.  Why?  Will “Dear” just lie there in the linguistic pool, soggy and motionless forever?

 

Dear is another one of those good old Germanic words that were part of the vocabulary of early speakers of the English language.  It was destined to be the homonym—homonyms being words with the same pronunciation but differing meanings—of the generic quarry of game-seeking hunters, the deer.  I’ll come to that in a minute.  The other, related meaning of dear had to do with commerce.  Dear means costly, expensive.  Though now rarely used in that sense in American English, it is still alive and well in many other places in the English-speaking world.  Any port in a storm.  That little chain of associations was useful as it transported my mind from Wilbur’s insolence and his road-graders to something more interesting, namely the commercial binary of dear (expensive) and cheap.

 

Now, this is really interesting.  Upscale goods proved in time to be too good for a four-letter Anglo-Saxon adjective.  They deserved something Latinish, something Frenchy.  Expenditure invokes the heaviness of precious metal bearing down on a hanging (dependere) scale.  The focus of the word was originally on the purchasing power of the buyer rather than on the quality of the goods.  Expensive is, so to speak, an expensive word.  Dear was a cheap one.  But, we notice, there is no expensive word for cheap, just cheap cheap on its own.  The root meaning of cheap was “market”.  The social and economic importance of markets in earlier European societies could easily be supposed even without the abundant linguistic evidence of place names in many European languages.  English Cheap Sides, East Cheaps, Chipping Nortons and a hundred other ch-p variants are scattered across the Ordinance Survey maps of Great Britain to this very day.  Descendants of the Latin mercatus (market) became more common after the Norman Invasion, so that we still speak of “market towns” and find numerous place-names like Downham Market.

 

Le Bon Marché, Paris

 

I don’t know whether free-market economists like Milton Friedman have sufficiently exploited the etymological encouragement for their theories possible to be found in historical dictionaries.  But ceap, market, is a word consumers usually like.  In French the Latin-based marché shows the same tendencies. The French version of “cheap” is à bon marché—at a good market price, I suppose.  One of the classic large Parisian department stores was called Le Bon Marché.  No American retailer of class would put “Cheap” in the name of a store today.  But French bon marché has not yet been wholly degraded.  It’s more like “great bargain.”  But the distinction between “great bargain” and “cheap and nasty” is on a sliding scale.  The mountains of synthetic junk that now clutter flea-markets and yard sales in my part of the world are evidence enough of that.  It well may be that the excellent English adjective tawdry derives from the name of a Dollar Store medieval market called the Fair of St. Audrey (‘Taudrey”), Audrey being the popular name of a royal Anglo-Saxon saint, Etheldrida!  Classy name, but crumby stuff.

 

So were I to respond to the unsolicited letter from my Nevada land speculator, the proper salutation should probably be…Cheap Wilbur…cheap in the American sense, of course.

 

The homophonic pairing of dear/deer, though irrelevant to most of what I have said so far, does illustrate another interesting linguistic phenomenon, the oscillation between generic and specific.  The modern German adjective for what I shall call economic dear is teuer.  The modern German word for “animal” is Tier.  It is obvious that English deer came to refer to a specific group of large animals frequently hunted by our ancestors.  In English, but not in German, the two words came to have the same pronunciation.  Something rather similar manifests itself in what you eat after you have killed the deer, namely meat.  But in early English meat was the generic word for all sorts of food.  There are a few residual memories of this: sweetmeats, the meat of a walnut.  But your average hairy-chested Old English huntsman was no Vegan.  He wanted his meat to bleed.  Your hairy-chested Anglo-Norman huntsman, on the other hand, was likely to be an aristocrat as interested in the chase as in the game—both words that suggest that the business had as much to do with sport as with alimentation.  But he too ate what he killed—venison, from venatio (hunting.)

 

 

 

 

*No sooner had I written this than we got a real letter from our dear granddaughter Ruby at summer camp!

Linguistic Change by Fiat

 

 

 

 

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

 

“The dictionary is not the language.  It is a treatise upon the language.”

 

Noah Webster (1755-1843)

 

 

 

I saw in a newspaper article that in Argentina the legislature recently passed a law forbidding the use of contrived gender-inclusive language in the public schools.  By “contrived” I mean new words especially invented to avoid the explicit gender distinctions embedded in what I shall call traditional or normative language.  In English-speaking countries, we have seen a certain amount of discussion about the use of the personal pronouns in the third person singular, he and she.  Various artificial substitutes have been suggested, manufactured explicitly to avoid sexual differentiation--such as zhi.  There are undoubtedly similar concerns regarding numerous other world languages.  Discussions of such topics tend to the polemical, and to become skirmishes in what we have come to call the “culture wars”.  As a person interested in languages, and especially in the history of our own language, I am hoping in this essay to stick to philology and eschew culture war.

 

It is not polemical, however, to  acknowledge  that the motive underlying such linguistic innovation is clearly political, reflecting the desire of acknowledging the real or hoped-for transition of transgenderism from the realm of the exotic and the marginal to that of the socially commonplace.  Gender differentiation is under attack on various grounds.  The legislative backlash is manifestly political.  The personal pronouns are not the only words in the arena of debate.  English is no longer as highly gendered as it once was, but a few fossilized nominal forms have survived long enough to excite controversy.  The most prominent of these was the pairing m(a/i)ster/mistress.  Oddly enough, the controversy centered not on the sexual distinction embedded in the terms, but on two distinct meanings arising in the feminine form.  The term for a younger woman was Miss, that for an older Mistress.  As Mistress suggested real or potential executive power within the family, it came to mean a married woman.  The word was commonly pronounced Missus and abbreviated Mrs.  Under the influence of late twentieth-century feminism the distinction between married and unmarried, thought to imply unwelcome social implications,  the distinct forms Miss and Mrs were elided into the abbreviation Ms.   Mr was retained, so we still have forms of address marked by sexual distinction.  Of great interest to me, however, is what happens with the pronunciation.  The second letter in Ms is pronounced as a z (alveolar, lung sound) rather than an s (“hissing” sibilant)—fancy phonetical terms referring to their anatomical origins in the vocal system.  That had to be to create phonic as well as graphic distinction between them.  It has not been a clean sweep.  Mrs and even Miss continue to be used by many English speakers in various countries.  There seems little debate here; any woman is free to choose her form of address.  There have been earlier erasures of sexual distinction as well.  In earlier English many occupational names had both masculine and feminine forms.  A man who produced bread for your table was a baker.  A woman who did so was a baxter.  The latter survives now only as a surname.  A male thespian was an actor, a female thespian an actress.  For reasons unclear to me the latter is becoming seriously politically incorrect among the same people who are happy enough to use long-winded specifications such as “the first black woman on the Supreme Court", or “our first African-American and Asian-American Vice President.”  Do we really expect as lengthy a line of this subgroup as there were Kings named Louis in France?   Airline stewardesses got neutralized to flight attendants, though not by all passengers.  Queens, princesses, and duchesses are at least temporarily safe because of the strange American fascination with British royalty.  Sex continues to triumph over politics with heterosexual husbands and wives.  All married gay women are wives and all married gay men are husbands, curiously continuing at one remove the “binary” ostensibly overthrown.

 

The national language of Argentina is Spanish.  Unlike English nouns, all Spanish nouns have one of two grammatical genders, feminine or masculine.  Many masculine nouns end in -o.  And as in English most plural nouns end in -s.  Here is what the Times says about the Argentinian innovations: “Instead of ‘amigos,’ the Spanish word for ‘friends,’ some Spanish speakers use ‘amigues.’ In place of ‘todos,” or ‘all,’ some write ‘todxs.’ And some signs that would say ‘bienvenidos,’ or ‘welcome,’ now say ‘bienvenid@s’.”  Since nearly all human beings are either male or female,  subgroups of humans can be composed of one or the other or (quite likely) both.  Some of these Spanish innovations are plausible, but others not.  The ending -ues as an ambiguous, ungendered plural would work with most Spanish nouns.  On the other hand, written words that cannot be pronounced are absurd.  This is as true of our LatinX as of Argentinian todxs.  And how, exactly, does one pronounce bienvenid@s in a fashion to achieve its genderless, inclusive intentions?  How does one pronounce it at all?  In the Renaissance, learned scholars greatly increased the English vocabulary through the introduction of so-called “inkhorn terms,” words dragged half-digested from the lexicons of Greek and Latin.  Many of these seemed so exotic that they fell by the wayside; but inkhorn terms caught on in the learned professions of the law, medicine, and academic theology.  “LatinX” is a rather different phenomenon from “Ms.”  I think it is unlikely that it will gain traction except as a marker of a specialized political jargon.

 

In cases of mixed-sex groups all the Romance languages follow the ancient Latin convention of using the masculine plural.  The linguistic tradition probably does reflect an ancient “gender bias,” but the solution most frequently used to address it—“if a candidate secures sufficient votes, he or she….”—violates a very useful principle of linguistic economy.  In theory the perceived inequity could be remedied by switching to a feminine default, except that such a solution stymies the presumed goal of equality or “neutrality”.  What I now notice in some academic writing, and even some journalism, is a contrived alternation of pronouns.  “The reader who is willing to give his full attention to the text is likely to find herself surprised by….”

 

The early Germanic languages, of which Old English was one, had three genders in its nominal system: feminine, masculine, and neuter.  The pronouns of the third person singulars were he (masc.), heo (fem.) and hit (neut.).  The later feminine form poses a mystery worth puzzling over.  Where did she of modern he, she, and it come from?  The Old English feminine singular definite article seo appears a likely suspect, but how and especially why?  If you have nothing better to do—and how could anyone possibly?—take some time out and read the erudite essay (s.v. “she”) in the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps some of our current cultural discontents might have been avoided if we still had a robust neuter.  It was this simplifying evolution that has left us with an apparently controversial “binary”.  But the correlations of biological sexuality and grammatical gender in our languages are less rigorous than one might at first suppose.  Common sense triumphs in most instances, but by no means all.  The German word for “maiden,” i.e., a virgin female, Mädchen, is neuter.  A German place setting is comprised of a neuter knife, a feminine fork, and a masculine spoon.  My search for a socio-politico-historical allegory in this triad has been fruitless.

 

            But one source of linguistic change is indeed political coercion.  I recently was reading Bulgakov’s wonderful novel The Master and Margarita, which has among its many strands some guarded satirical swipes at Soviet literary culture in Stalin’s Moscow of the 1930s.  One of the important characters is a kind of literary commissar in charge of the writers’ union—called MASSOLIT, that is, something like “Literature for the Masses”.  Such grotesque terms, usually formed from compound abbreviations, became very common in “political” Russian and a distinctive feature of the “new” language.  The linguistic gesture involved seems to be a natural reflex of bureaucratic groups, such as our military and various branches of our Federal Government.

 

Linguistic change is constant--quite slow on the phonetic side (alteration of sound), much faster on the semantic (meaning) side and in the borrowing of foreign words and the invention of many new ones.  The phonetic change in our own tongue since the first arrival of English speakers in America has been dramatic.  Contemporary native English as spoken in various parts of the world, despite powerful homogenizing cultural pressures, is of an astonishing variety in what we usually call “accent” and “vocabulary”.  To study Chaucer, a master of English who died in 1400, requires a little introductory preparation.  To read Beowulf, written by a master who may have died as late as about 1000, demands more work than a Duolingo course in contemporary Dutch or German.  The purpose of language is to allow human beings to live effectively in an accurately described and evolutionary world.   Whether language is the principal cause or merely the extraordinary characteristic feature of the human domination of the animal world is perhaps debatable, but the evolutionary impulse of our own English, still by far the most important channel of global verbal communication, is and must be aimed toward ever greater clarity, specificity, and precision.  Imposed changes designed to express particular social or political views of social or cultural reality, especially if they vehemently challenge and contest  a world-wide consensus of a few thousand years, are unlikely to get much traction except on university campuses or in the editorial rooms of journals and newspapers.